Time Distortion as a Metric for Information and Economy in Organizational Control

AbstractOrganizational management systems, for control and command, have attracted a great amount of research and debate since the very origin of management, as its underlying question is: how to manage human activity systems successfully? More recently, the so-called ‘Balanced Score Card’ approach has assumed dominance in managers’ practice. While that approach has its merits, it also has some important limitations; among others it ignores time and its relation to information. To deal with some aspect of this limitation, this paper introduces a metric, (e.g. mathematical model) funded upon information theory (entropy) that is linked through a notion of time-distortion to the economic performance of an organization. In this, a goal-related time- distortion, between a management system and its operating system, is a carrier of information with economic dependence. The proposed model shows, among others, that time-distortion influences economic performance dramatically, including a lever effect, while high information entropy does not necessarily imply high economic outcome